MI5 facing five more torture investigations

MI5 may face up to five new torture investigations that threaten to paralyse
the Security Service.

Writing in The Daily Telegraph, Jonathan Evans, the Director General of MI5, launched a passionate defence of the security services.Photo: AP

By Richard Edwards, Crime Correspondent

7:30AM GMT 22 Feb 2010

A senior lawyer in the office of Baroness Scotland, the attorney general, has been studying the cases of five British men alleged to have been unlawfully detained and tortured in Pakistan with the complicity of MI5.

Baroness Scotland is expected to decide this week whether there is sufficient evidence to refer the cases to Scotland Yard for a full investigation.

Ali Dayan Hasan, a researcher for Human Rights Watch, said he has been given evidence from Pakistani officials that MI5 and MI6 officers knew about the torture but continued to take part — directly or indirectly — in interrogations.

Allegations of complicity in the torture of Britons have become MI5’s biggest crisis of recent years.

There has been a backlash in Whitehall amid the belief that human rights lawyers and Islamic activists are, perhaps unwittingly, helping the cause of Islamic extremism.

Writing in The Daily Telegraph earlier this month, Jonathan Evans, the director-general of MI5, issued a passionate defence of the Security Service against the "conspiracy theory" that it covered up its involvement in torture.

It came after Lord Neuberger said that there was a "culture of suppression" at MI5.

Baroness Scotland called in detectives over two cases last year, including that of Binyam Mohamed, the former Guantánamo Bay detainee who was tortured by the CIA.

An MI5 officer who questioned Mr Mohamed in Pakistan is the subject of the Metropolitan police inquiry into whether he broke international laws on torture.

Detectives are also examining the role of MI5 in the case of Shaker Aamer, an inmate of Guantanamo Bay whose family lives in London, and an MI6 officer is under investigation over a British resident illegally detained in Pakistan in 2002.

The five new cases being considered include that of a 24-year-old medical student, identified only as ZZ, who was allegedly abducted off the street and tortured for two months in a building opposite the British deputy high commission in Karachi. Towards the end of his detention, he says, he was questioned by two British intelligence officers.

Four other cases being considered all involved suspects formally accused or convicted of involvement in terrorism.

Zeeshan Siddiqui, from Hounslow, west London, was arrested in Pakistan in May 2005. His lawyers claim he was interviewed while in a traumatised state on six occasions by British intelligence officers, including some from MI6.

Siddiqui, who returned to the UK after being acquitted of forging an identity card, was placed under house arrest and has since disappeared.

Convicted terrorist Salahuddin Amin, from north London, has said that after being tortured he was taken to a building where he was questioned on almost a dozen occasions by two British men called Matt and Richard, who allegedly had said they were from MI5.

Agents were also allegedly involved in the case of Rangzieb Ahmed, from Lancashire, who was convicted of directing terrorism in the UK in 2008.

Mr Evans, who became director general of MI5 in 2007, but ran its international terrorism section at the time of the allegations, admitted that British intelligence agencies were "slow to detect" US mistreatment of detainees after 9/11. But he insisted: "We in the UK agencies did not practise mistreatment or torture then and do not do so now, nor do we collude in torture or encourage others to torture on our behalf."